Lincoln Legal Briefs

              A Quarterly Newsletter of The Lincoln Legal Papers
A Documentary History of the Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, 1836-1861
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October — December 2006 Number 80
New Dockets Reveal Seventeen New Cases
Whenever an auction house sells a large
collection of Lincoln manuscripts, it
invariably yields documents that were previously
unknown to scholars. When Heritage Auction
Galleries sold the Henry E. Luhrs Collection in two
auctions this year, project editors learned of 98 new
legal documents. Twenty-two of those documents led
to twenty-two new cases in the circuit courts of
Champaign, Edgar, Sangamon, Tazewell, and
Vermilion counties. The discovery of these
documents required project editors to travel to those
counties to search for case files and other
documentation relating to these cases.
In November, Assistant Editor Chris Schnell
and Research Associate Kelley Boston traveled to
the Champaign County Courthouse in Urbana, Illi-nois,
to research the four new
legal cases from the Luhrs
documents. While there, they
discovered three judge’s
dockets, a judgment docket,
an execution docket, and a
clerk’s docket dating back to
1835. Project editors had not
seen these docket books dur-ing
the initial Champaign
County research for The Law
Practice of Abraham Lin-coln:
Complete Documen-tary
Edition. Two of the
judge’s docket books, which
cover the years 1850-1856,
yielded seventeen new legal
cases in which Lincoln was
involved. These new cases
took place in the criminal,
chancery, and common law
divisions and represent a va-riety
of legal actions, including a criminal charge of
keeping a tippling house (saloon). In that case, People
v. Joseph Fitzpatrick, Lincoln served as the judge in
the October 1854 term of court and continued the
case until the next term. In the June 1856 term, Lin-coln
also served as a defendant attorney in three
criminal charges of selling liquor.
These new docket books are a great discovery
for the project not only because they have yielded
new legal cases, but also because they represent a
period of Champaign County’s early history. As the
county developed economically and its population
increased, the terms of court became longer and the
number of cases heard at each term increased.
Lincoln’s law practice in Champaign County
increased correspondingly during this time period.
Folio from 1856 Champaign County Judge’s Docket Book
(Lincoln wrote his name as defendant attorney
in the second column in two cases.)